Got Some Emacs In My Vim
I’m trying out the Vimacs plugin for Vim. This basically turns Vim into a non-modal editor with Emacs style keybindings.
Obviously it’s not a full clone, but most of the navigation works like it does in Emacs, and even things like window commands, changing buffers, and quitting / saving files.
It seems to be good enough that I actually don’t find myself using it and getting frustrated.
I’m not sure that I would recommend it to someone who wasn’t specifically after the Emacs keybindings, because I actually think Vim’s normal keybindings are faster and more consistent than Emacs.
But for some reason, I find the Emacs keybindings to be more pleasant to use (except that when I don’t have arrow keys available I long for hjkl movement).
Got Some Bass In My Guitar
Continuing the theme of making things act like other things, I’ve been playing around with tuning my guitar in 4ths across the strings kind of like it’s a 6 string bass an octave higher.
I find it much easier to use for soloing, because the tuning is consistent. If I find a pattern that I like in one place it is trivial to move it around or transpose it to a new location. I can go across strings and keep the same pattern.
So I basically now tune the B and high E strings up a half step for soloing, and then tune them back down if I want to play chords for accompaniment. That’s not perhaps ideal, because it means I can’t easily switch between soloing and accompanying in the same song, but it seems to be the only real way for me to be able to solo without consistent mistakes on guitar.
I’d also like to keep playing with bass and see if it makes sense to get one at some point.
Fortran
It’s seems a bit wrong to admit that I’m actually liking using Fortran to work back through some early Project Euler problems.
I can’t really explain it – maybe it’s because Fortran is actually a pretty simple language (especially Fortran 77). and at least for the stuff so far has been pretty easy to get working.
Vimacs – 1 Frustration
The only frustrating thing I have found about the Vimacs plugin for Vim is that I can’t figure out how to call a different .vimrc file for it without it somehow disabling certain aspects of Vimacs.
I also can’t set a new color scheme in the command to start vimacs because it looks like the .vimrc file is sourced after vim starts up, therefore, I have to leave out a default color scheme in my .vimrc file if I want to be able to set the color for vimacs. However, then I can’t set the color scheme for a default run of Vim.
I don’t think any of this is really the fault of Vimacs, more a result of the way Vim works.
Linux Mint Debian Edition
I’m trying out installing the above named version of Linux on a virtualbox instance at work. I like the idea of rolling release distributions, but Arch has given me a couple of instances where upgrades were less than smooth.
I am curious to find out whether a rolling release based on Debian might be less prone to breakage.
Linux Mint VirtualBox
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get VirtualBox Guest Additions working with Linux Mint Debian Addition. Or if they are installed, the video resizing is still not working seamlessly.
Actually 